but you'll figure it out if you keep trying. have you got behind the 'initiative for democracy' yet? or are you going to wait for someone else to save the nation from 'americanism'?

h. l. mencken knew that when fascism came to america, it would be americanized.

the nation that gave us 'free-fire zones' and then moved up to 'collateral damage' is once again demonstrating the surgical precision of military justice.

why is no one saluting?

the nation that came up with 'body count', 'free-fire zones', and 'phoenix program' and characterized mylai as a minor case of over-zealous dissemination of democracy might not have all that high a reputation to begin with.

when, a few years back, sac reported they had succeeded in dropping a bomb on a wedding party in afghanistan because a member of alqaeda might have attended, the other 150 people became 'collateral damage', showing that the concept of 'free-fire zone' was not obsolete.

seeing what happened to most of the neighbors of the growing usa, and then the extension of 'neighbor' from puerto rico to laos, open-minded americans will understand that nothing you do causes any great surprise, any more.

reputation? you been watching too many john wayne movies.

a law which can't be enforced is merely a lie, perhaps a pious hope. a law which the competent authority will not enforce is a law with neither piety nor potency in it.

sexual assault happens in the usa in spite of relatively benign conditions for women. if you think going to iraq should, or can, provide equal conditions, you are a fool. i will even hazard a guess that the men you find working in a war zone include a higher percentage of marginal sociopaths than on american city streets.

signing a contract to participate in a war should have inspired careful reading of the contract, even if you are careless about your phone or credit card contracts. but if you decide to take the money after you have considered where you will be working, for whom you will be working, and with whom you will be working, then surely you should be unsurprised at the result.

nonetheless,i hope kbr is pursued through the courts. expecting morality from corporations is childish, so the only check on them is financial sanctions. i won't be surprised if the result is unsatisfying for you, american courts are not much refuge nowadays, and the purpose of these arbitration contracts is precisely to arm defense lawyers.

'contractors' get high rates of pay, for the work they do. because they're working in the middle of a war.

there is no law where conflict is settled with a gun. a woman who enters this situation should pack a gun, and make will. and if she is groped, assaulted, or gang-raped, that's why the contract said arbitration, not litigation.

these women entered the contract, lost their bet, and only now discover they've been deprived of rights. tough!

the news reports explained about 'body-count' and 'free-fire zones', 'phoenix programs' and 'agent orange'. then calley got a couple of years confinement to barracks for mylai,and vietnam became a 'mistake'.

i formed the opinion then that the american electorate were not concerned about moral questions, as long as genocide didn't inconvenience them personally. things haven't changed.

the democrat leadership knows the caliber of the people who voted twice for george w bush. if they are told that they supported war crimes they will not fall to their knees and ask "where is salvation". if told they supported an incompetent who has gutted the nation's economy while soiling the nation's reputation, will they say: "my god! i was a fool!" nope. they'll cover their mistake with another.

pathetic as the dem congress may be, they could be right not to remark on the suppurating corpse of the bush administration. there's just too many americans who pulled the trigger, not least among the dem politicians..

maybe you will find that depression, apathy, cynicism and corruption are the natural results of living on someone else's land, taken and held by militarism.

talk to hamas, find out if they are willing to share the land with you in a secular nation called palestine. if they are not, you are doomed.

if mccain suffers a major stroke two weeks before the convention, 'what's his name' will look like a lazy wimp for dropping out, and huck can demonstrate it's possible to do worse than goldwater and dukakis.

what a wonderful world it would be, if we did business in public. you could still steal from the tax man, support a secret mistress, bribe a politician- but it would be so hard and dangerous that virtue might be seen to be sensible.

that's getting the people in charge of the nation. mike gravel has a plan to do it. it's called 'initiative for democracy'.

every other 'change' is just a change of faces, a change of 'more' or 'less', but not direction.

a politician can't change things in any fundamental way, change needs the people to stop regarding politics as an occasional entertainment, played by professionals. they have to say "by the people means us."

that's why obama is a phony, clinton worse, and any republican a disaster. the only real change they are looking for is their own face on the 6 oclock news.

america is a backward nation, mired in greed, ignorance and religion. the chances of the human race in general, or america in particular, wrenching itself into survival-of-the-race activity seems very slim.

but when you consider the alternative to immediate action, then rational behavior is pretending science and socialism will triumph over ignorance and personal selfishness. "leave me alone to get rich by looting the planet while cheating the tax man" can't be tolerated any more. if you go on calling it freedom and capitalism, your grandchildren, if they survive, will change their names and pretend to be born from a lab bottle.